Escaping Pain Through Porn

Numbing the pain using porn as a drug.

I was just reminded this past weekend why some people turn to drugs, alcohol and pornography – to escape pain. As humans we do everything we can to avoid pain. It’s one of our instincts.

If we have a headache, we take aspirin or Tylenol. If we are suffering with a cold we take various cold medicines. When something inflicts pain we flinch and pull away. How about when situations from the past or our current life cause pain? Don’t we want to avoid that emotional or relational pain as well?

Avoiding emotional and relational pain from the past or in our current life is an instinct. What we do to avoid this pain and cope with it is where we can get into trouble. Sometimes these situations we are trying to cope with are out of our control and we don’t know how to process them or what to do.

Instead of dealing with the problems we tend to want to forget about them and avoid them. Using pornography provides this escape and makes us feel good. We tend to go from feeling pain, to avoiding pain to seeking pleasure.

Indulging in these pleasures makes the pain go away temporarily, and really compounds the pain in the end. You know the list of consequences that go along with using pornography, but we don’t think of that when we are indulging. It feels good so we just do it and have to keep doing it to maintain the pleasure and avoid the pain. Pretty soon we have an addiction.

Breaking these addictions is necessary, but don’t forget about the underlying pain that you were avoiding in the first place. Dealing with that pain is essential to staying addiction free. If you don’t deal with the pain, you will fall right back into your addiction.

Seek professional help to pinpoint those sources of pain in your life. They will help you clarify what is causing your pain and they will walk you through dealing with them instead of avoidance.

There is a saying “The only way out is through”. Working your way out of addiction and pain will be tough, but it is necessary to achieve the freedom you want. Freedom from addiction. Freedom from trauma in the past. Freedom from current life situations.